The objective of this paper is to explore the associations made in mass mediated
articulations of biotechnology. It serves as the basis for further analyses of mass
mediated controversies and the purpose is to establish a map of the landscape of
mass mediated articulation of biotechnology. Which kinds of genetic research
and technology are articulated in what way? What can be associated to what in
the mass mediation and when is it portrayed as controversial? In short this is a
study of associations in the news production that serves as a way of establishing
an empirical archive for further work. It is based on a relational ontology
inspired by French philosopher Bruno Latour, supplemented with the method of
content analysis developed within sociology of mass media. The aim is to study
the production of networks of articulation in mass media by looking at the
outcome (the articles), which they produce.

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Despite the last years’ efforts to innovate public education in Denmark the Danish public school
has remained hesitant to change, and relations with the surrounding world have remained in their
early stages. Using Michel Callon’s concept of translation our study sheds light on the social
processes that form the conditions of managing innovation among professionals. It shows how
managing innovation in practice is part of a complex network of social interaction and evolves as a
constant ‘translation’ aiming at enrolling opposing actors, and positioning oneself in relation to the
professional identities and positions that innovation put at risk. The analytical contribution of our
paper is to add comprehension to innovation management in the public sector as a process of
positioning innovation in relation to a variety of human and non-human actors as well as
professional identities. Innovation is shown to challenge the professional identities of the teachers
and school leaders, as the teachers experience that innovation is not recognized in standardized
tests and thereby jeopardizes their professional position. Onwards the paper outlines three
management strategies that evolve in the social processes of the translation of innovation and the
different management positions that these strategies entail.

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Co-creation has emerged today as a concept which thinkers across otherwise largely
opposed traditions have come to embrace. This dissertation substantiates how the
concept of co-creation, from proponents of Strategic Management Thought to
thinkers coming out of Autonomist Marxism and Critical Management Studies,
appears as designating either: (1) a new win-win mode of value creation where
businesses co-create value with various sorts of outsiders; (2) a new social,
commons-based value creation autonomous from business interests; or (3) a mode
of value creation intimately intertwined with new modes of management capable of
harnessing and exploiting productive capacities outside established organizations.
Behind these contemporary differences, the dissertation discloses a more
encompassing history. Through this, the emergence of a widely shared co-creation
vocabulary is brought forth. While this vocabulary is used persistently to express a
whole new mode of value creation, in whatever form, the dissertation argues that
the co-creation vocabulary actually undermines the very possibility of speaking
about value creation in a consistent manner.
At the same time, however, it is not a vocabulary which can just be dispensed
with, since its emergence is intimately intertwined with an accelerated emphatic
injunction; an injunction advanced by a reformulated managementality that
throughout the twentieth century has tempted management ‘to go outside’.
Accounting for this history, the dissertation claims that a complex experience has
been born, an experience of the outside. Through this experience, the outside has
emerged not merely as a source of value creation and an object of management; it
has also emerged as an obligation that has to be met, an obligation which is
forcefully expressed today through the co-creation vocabulary.
In order to inquire into contemporary accounts of co-creation, as well as the
historical trajectories through which this phenomenon has come to emerge, the
dissertation develops what is designated as the historical problematization analysis,
inspired by and reconstructed from the very late work of Michel Foucault. By
utilizing this mode of analysis, it becomes possible to bring together otherwise
separate accounts of co-creation on the same level of analysis, to inquire into
central historical conditions of possibility through which the phenomenon of cocreation
has come to emerge and to take stock of what difference the arrival of cocreation
introduces in relation to yesterday.

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Financial Literacy and the Corporate Governmentalization of the ‘Business of Life’

Højbjerg, Erik(Frederiksberg, 2014)

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Resume:

This
paper
is
a
work-­‐in-­‐progress.
The
purpose
of
the
paper
is
programmatic
in
the
sense
that
it
tries
to
formulate
elements
of
a
research
agenda
revolving
around
the
issue
of
corporate
governmentalization.
By
this
term
I
intend
to
indicate
ways
in
which
companies
seek
to
construe
and
mobilize
consumer
subjectivities
whose
consuming
practices
involve
the
self-­‐
management
of
the
individual
along
etho-­‐political
goals
of
good
governance.
The
back-­‐drop
of
this
topic
is
the
investigation
of
the
forms
of
contemporary
social
and
political
transformation,
with
a
focus
on
the
transformative
powers
of
‘politicized
private
enterprises’
or
the
‘political
corporation’.
The
research
question
is:
How
do
corporations
seek
to
construe
and
mobilize
responsible
citizens
by
offering
products
and
services,
the
consumption
of
which
are
assumed
to
transform
the
individual¹s
self-­‐relationship
along
proclaimed
ethical
and
political
goals?
The
research
question
will
be
discussed
in
the
context
of
financial
literacy
educational
initiatives.
In
the
aftermath
of
the
2008
global
financial
crisis,
increasing
the
financial
literacy
of
ordinary
citizen-­‐consumers
has
taken
a
prominent
position
among
regulators
and
financial
institutions
alike.
The
logic
seems
to
be
that
financially
capable
individuals
will
enjoy
social
and
political
inclusion
as
well
as
an
ability
to
exercise
a
stronger
influence
in
markets.
The
paper
specifically
contributes
to
our
understanding
of
the
governmentalization
of
the
present
by
addressing
how
-­‐
at
least
in
part
-­‐
the
corporate
spread
of
financial
literacy
educational
initiatives
can
be
observed
as
a
particular
form
of
power
at-­‐a-­‐distance.
The
focus
is
on
the
role
of
private
enterprise
in
governmentalizing
the
‘business
of
life’
by
establishing
and
mobilizing
specific
conceptual
forms
around
which
the
life
skills
of
the
entrepreneurial
self
involves
a
responsibilization
of
the
individual
citizen-­‐consumer.

How can service companies get their employees to ‘live the brand’? This thesis answers this
question through a dialogue between practice and theory. It investigates the potential of
philosophical-dialogical methods to transform abstract brand values into action in corporate
branding praxis at TDC and explores opportunities to apply the methods in context of service
companies in general. It develops an understanding of corporate branding as an organisational and
cultural project in which collective dialogue-processes serve as the main sensemaking process.

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This rather substantial summary will encapsulate what is the meaning of Performance
Society. This work consists of three thesis elements touching on politics,
economy and art that confront the question of biopolitics. The work describes
a power over life (biopower) and will follow a twofold logic: the first is
expressed through state administration and management technologies; the
second is expressed as localized in life itself as subject [zoe] in new modes of
production of work through the power of imagination, self‐creation, and affectproduction
within Art and Culture.
The summary is organized around three different themes. Each of these themes
constitutes my contribution to the field of biopolitics.....

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How special groups organize for collaborative creativity in conditions of spatial variability and distance

O’Donnell, Shannon(Frederiksberg, 2013)

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[Færre oplysninger]

Resume:

The enormous challenges and opportunities impacting the world community today increasingly require people to practice collaborative innovation effectively both in person and across geographic boundaries. Simultaneously, advances in technology such as social networking tools, digital 3-D representations, virtual worlds, and open source practices are inspiring generations of users to develop new kinds of adaptive collaborative networks and capabilities. But when people work across organizational and geographic boundaries, new challenges arise that make it difficult for groups to achieve the levels of excellence they are capable of achieving together in close proximity. Practitioners need help determining how best to perform collaborative creativity given unique and dynamic work conditions. Meanwhile, as new forms of creative group work emerge at an accelerating pace, researchers struggle to keep up with and develop nuanced understanding of the variations in collaborative processes we increasingly see performed.
With this PhD research, I aim to increase our understanding of a particular, specialized form of collaborative creativity called “ensembling.” I investigate this phenomenon by studying it in diverse—including “stretched”—conditions. By stretched, I mean that, literally, groups are stretched apart in space as membership size and spatial distance between members increase and work configurations vary. The groups I study are those both capable of achieving and driven to achieve a peak-performance state of ensemble, and do so via the enactment of an interdependent set of methods that call ensemble into being, a process I call ensembling. In their ideal form, these work methods support the emergence of ensemble and result in the creation of aesthetically coherent and novel outcomes that are particularly responsive to the contexts in which they are made.
To investigate the phenomenon of ensemble, I first develop a construct of ensemble based on informant descriptions, and use theory and data to develop a detailed description of how ensembling is performed in natural conditions (i.e., in close physical proximity). Then I look at an extreme example in which a set of expert groups’ ability to ensemble was put under stress by an unprecedented work task. In 2009, multiple string quartets (many considered world class) organized to perform a new musical composition. The composition challenged four quartets at a time to perform as an integrated ensemble while sitting apart, in various configurations, and at spatial distances of up to 70 feet. To help them address the difficulties produced by increased membership and distance, the musicians integrated a simple coordinating technology into their process.
To learn how participants made ensemble possible given these new conditions, I engaged multiple qualitative methods for generating data and multiple perspectives for interpretation. I first considered their process as an iterative approach to exploring strategies for addressing constraints, in order to show how the methods of ensembling interacted with conditions of increased group size, increased spatial distance and configurational variability, and to elicit their evolving beliefs about what methods made ensemble more likely to occur given these conditions. Then I performed an alternative interpretation, disrupting this logic and exploring the ways in which participants used methods of ensembling—particularly openness to uncertainty and reconceiving—to create unanticipated potentialities for ensemble to emerge despite constraints. I show how they worked with a coordinating technology called a “click-track” in important new ways that went beyond “merely” achieving synchronous coordination to increasing their autonomy, relatedness, and ability to demonstrate artistic virtuosity, enabling them to engage equally in leadership and participation and to play. Finally, performing a comparative analysis across sub-units of the case, including examples of breakdown in the process, I generated additional insights into what conditions, beliefs, methods and behaviors enable or inhibit processes of ensembling.
Integrating learning from analysis and interpretation, I propose a new range of conditions in which ensembling is possible, and a revised and expanded description of the methods by which groups ensemble. Conditions can expand to include larger groups with limited-tenure consisting of enduring-tenure sub-groups, multiple task interdependencies at group and sub-group levels, balanced tenure at sub-group level, a balance between proximity and distance, opportunities to work with and without technological mediation, and self-determined configuration variability. I show that the emergence of ensemble depends on, for instance, a shared purpose to ensemble, and methods such as a “struggle” phase, episodes of close physical proximity, collective leadership, “dueting” in different configurations, reconceiving constraints, living with the paradox of one-and-four, opening the process to uncertainty and to the emergence of consent, and subliminal technology engagement. Ultimately, these groups demonstrated an increasing ability to adapt to new conditions faster and more creatively, making new configurations possible, and suggesting ways in which ensemble might be performed in other kinds of group settings. I summarize findings in the form of a “framework of ensembling” that is meant to serve as a tool to further enrich our yet nascent understanding of this complex phenomenon and to aid in the exploration of ensembling in contexts outside the usual places we expect it to occur.

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The roles of accounting in shaping the economy are currently being rediscovered by sociologists (Callon, 1998; Fligstein, 1990; Granovetter, 1985). This recent revival of interest in accounting marks a further stage in a curious pattern of alternate attention and neglect on the part of sociologists towards the practices that make the economy visible and measurable qua economy. This paper reviews the different ways in which accounting has been given a wider sociological significance across the twentieth century. It argues for a focus on how new calculative practices emerge within historically specific assemblages, and how they alter the capacities of agents and organisations, and the interrelations among them. Investment appraisal practices are used to illustrate.
The paper is in five sections. Section one introduces the paper. Section two considers briefly the work of Max Weber in the early 20th century, and the link established in his writings between accounting and rationalisation. Section three considers a subsequent stage, with a markedly different focus, namely the emergence in the 1950s and 1960s of a substantial literature on budgeting. Heavily influenced by theories of group dynamics, this literature focussed primarily on management accounting in an intra-organisational setting. Section four examines a further stage, characterised by the elaboration of a range of methodologies from approximately 1980 onwards that had as their concern to analyse the social and organisational aspects of accounting. The methodologies developed and applied here included those that focus on the institutional environments of accounting, the political economy of accounting, ethnographic approaches, and a concern with the networks within which accounting is embedded. Section five considers one particular strand of the recent economic sociology literature, that which concerns the calculative capacities of agents and their embeddedness in social networks. While endorsing the revival of interest in economic sociology, this paper argues that rather than focus on the enduring and transhistorical attributes of agents and networks, emphasis be placed on the roles of accounting within historically localised and temporarily stabilised assemblages of practices. Also, in place of an emphasis on the role of economics and economic theory in formatting the real economy, attention is directed to the more prosaic practices of management accounting which make it possible to act upon persons and processes within and between organisations.
These arguments in favour of focussing on the calculative practices of accounting are illustrated briefly through consideration of a relatively neglected topic in management accounting - investment appraisal. The practice of "investment bundling" as elaborated at Caterpillar Inc in the early 1990s is considered. An investment bundle was defined there as a multi-period capital spending program based on the diverse yet mutually reinforcing assets needed to manufacture a core product module in a specified area on the factory floor. It is argued that the practice of investment bundling as developed at Caterpillar helped operationalise a world-wide transformation of production regimes within a particular corporate setting, and in a manner compatible with the broader problematising of the competitiveness of North American industry which can be termed a "politics of the product". Investment bundling provided a device for intervening within the firm, and in consonance with a broader transformation of concepts of competitiveness and economic citizenship.

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Collaborations are formed as inter-organisational relations, which are special forms of networks creating and spanning boundaries of organisations. This chapter is focusing on social networking mechanisms for organising, and managing networks. This is one of the features for understanding collaboration and management of collaborations. Networking is a new understanding of management in an economy in which uncertainty and turbulence are the norms rather than the exception. Network management in an entrepreneurial turbulent environment is seen as enacting power in a ‘negotiated management’ process involving partners much more than an established position in a hierarchy where power is exercised. The focus is on obtaining control and power, but also to keep all the actors active even when they are formally out of control of the manager. The question is how to create and maintain the role as project manager on joint projects with other firms. Networking is one way of mobilising resources, through which resources for establishing research and innovation are explored and exploited. In all research and innovation projects, the legitimacy of both technologies, firms and research teams are important. Legitimate partners, such as: recognised peers and research environments as well as international research funding may be exploited as a viable strategy for establishing a good reputation, and thus a strategy to create legitimacy of own innovation and research.